There are people I try to see every year, just to hear what they are thinking about and working on. Just to hear what they think the rest of us need to think about and work on. Ever since I first saw him at NCTE16, Cornelius Minor has become one of those people.

Cornelius was the key note speaker at the CEL luncheon–my first time ever attending the conference after the conference. At the core of his talk was a call to action: support teachers to take on their own classroom-based action research that confronts the problems that plague their classrooms. He framed all of this with a larger conversation about systems that oppress our students, about how when we remain neutral in a stream we go with it, about how when we remain neutral in a system, we perpetuate it. About how it’s not enough to just say you’re against a system that oppresses–you have to actively disrupt it. He presented a lengthy list of places where oppression hides in schools, and grading wasn’t on the list, but it certainly belongs there.

The grading system as we know it–points/grades for compliance and a constantly updating, high stakes grade in the electronic gradebook–fails to empower students to own their learning and growth. It’s a power system where the one who awards the points and grades has all the power and students are left scrambling to collect as many points as they can.

What our students need to be doing instead is honing their skills as readers and writers. Ours is a complex world to read. They need to be able read that complexity if they’ll be able to write their own futures within it.

Cornelius reminded us that what we teach–literacy–at its center is not an academic pursuit. It’s a socio-political one. Literacy sits at the core of democracy. Teaching literacy is a radical concept, he explained, and denying literacy of any human is one of the most vicious forms of oppression that there is.

My no-grades journey has always been about empowering students. It’s always been about creating a classroom where they own the learning rather than waiting for the numbers I put in the gradebook to tell them if they’ve learned anything or not. When it was about the number, the points, the grade, that is all my students looked at rather than the critically important learning they need to do.

When I’ve said in the past “stop grading,” it doesn’t really capture the work we need to do. In most cases, we can’t stop grading. I can’t. I still have to get to semester grades. But there’s nothing that says I can’t get there in ways that will lead to more empowerment for my students. I can disrupt the grading that is expected of me. THAT is what I’ve been up to for the last four years, even though along the way I didn’t quite have the right term to capture it.

So let’s disrupt grading. The blog series I wrote last fall is about that. I’m hoping to turn it into a book–that’s been my focus of late, and it’s the main reason this blog hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should.

Best of luck fellow teacher friends out there with the end of the semester. At my school, we have one more week for finals. I’m buried in semester grade letters–but the stories my students are telling me about their journeys as readers and writers this semester are inspiring. I’m loving every moment of it.

We can make grading a route to empowerment. We can make the semester grade an opportunity for reflection over and celebration of our students’ learning.

Home already, thanks to the magic of air travel. There wasn’t really a venue for this at the conference, but I did a ton of writing this year at NCTE. And I did manage to work up a whole song. Just for you all. So here, in its global premier, is ‘The English Teacher Blues.’

But my theme for this conference is authenticity, which means being real. And the real is I also heard some tough stuff at this conference.

We were talking at dinner on Friday and someone I really respect (Stevi Quate- check her out, she’s awesome) challenged me to really think through how I would encourage and advise a fellow teacher to start changing things in the classroom in the way that we’ve been advocating. I like being challenged and pushed and it was a fair call, especially knowing how hard it is to enact change under even the best of circumstances.

In our presentation on Saturday many teachers asked about how to do the things we do when there is either subtle or overt resistance to change in departments, schools and districts, and from colleagues, administrators, and communities. Those are serious questions that we are trying to answer (here’s one take from a while back- it’s hardly complete, but it’s a start).

At dinner I finally got the full story about a teacher who nearly lost a job because of what they posted online. It’s a long and interesting story, and I encouraged that teacher to write about it, because it’s a story that needs to be told.

Last night we went to Fountains of the Muse (holy crap people, why didn’t someone tell us about this, and why aren’t you ALL there. Never mind, next year I’m making you go). We got talking, near the end, about the challenge of being who we really are as teachers and people (I’m a musician, and I think that raised some questions, since I’m also a teacher). Several folks shared about the fear they feel around revealing parts of themselves as teachers. We shared a bit about our fears about blogging when we first started- and we did have fears.

And we are judged, and shamed, and silenced. Often. In our departments, in our schools, in our districts, and in our state and national politics. That is the real. That is one of our truths. And we need to speak that truth.

Here’s another truth. There are a lot of us. Together we have a big voice. A really big voice. NCTE is a way to connect with others, to amplify our voice. Find other ways. Make friends and allies. In your school. Your neighborhood. Your union. Your local politics. Your state association. Twitter (yes, it’s a cesspool, but it’s also a great way to connect). However you do it, find your people, find your voice, be heard. We need all of us to join in here. Even you.

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Yes, I am finally joining the Paper Graders as an official member! Mrs. B is here! We had an amazing day at NCTE today, including a presentation entitled Stop Grading: Empower Your Students to Evaluate Their Own Learning to over 200 people in a not-quite-big-enough room at the St. Louis Convention Center. Sarah and Jay spoke about how they are teaching students to take ownership of their own learning by creating their own learning goals, becoming better at reading their own writing and finding flaws in their drafts which they can correct. I shared how my IB students practice for their Oral Exams by pairing up and sitting across from each other with one person as the speaker and one as the listener, and while the speaker delivers his or her commentary on a poem or soliloquy or piece of prose, the listener listens, very carefully, and takes copious notes on the commentary being given by their partner. The exercise is one to prepare them for their Oral Exam in January, since there is no way for me to sit with each of my 90 IB students and listen to a 10-minute commentary. They are learning how to listen carefully, take notes carefully, present a commentary in a compelling way, and then give feedback to their partner that will help them improve in their next attempt at an oral commentary. The point being that I am trying to teach my IB students who are getting ready to head off to college, work, the military or world travel how to speak clearly, listen carefully, and help another human being improve their efforts at speaking and listening. These are skills that will help them in college, in jobs, in life, and they are also learning how to be more independent from me, the teacher, and help each other without my interference. In the end, these practice sessions help me as much as they help them, because I don’t need to be listening to every word of 90 students, but can listen in and offer a helping hand when needed.

My day started with a wonderful walk with Sarah Zerwin down by the riverside as we ventured early this morning to the Saint Louis Archway Park and surveyed the Arch itself, along with the park around the Arch, the trails leading down to the river, and the life of St. Louis on an early Saturday morning. We saw a river barge going by, just as it would have many years ago, we saw the sun come out from behind the clouds to light up the Arch, we saw an amazing bronze statue of Lewis and Clark returning from their long exploration to the Pacific Ocean, and we saw a beautiful little cobblestoned section of St. Louis called Laclede’s Landing, St. Louis’ oldest district. The sad part of our journey was that we saw a few runners and Park rangers, but not many other people, a common theme in our few days here in the city that has served as the Gateway to the West. Jay noticed that there seems to be an emptiness in St. Louis, as if the life of the city has been punched out in the last few years. We heard some poetry shared by Noana, a young teacher at tonight’s Fountain of the Muse session after all the other NCTE participants had gone home, that backed up what we were feeling. She lives here, and she wrote a beautiful poem about St Louis, about the old buildings that seem to have black eyes from the blown-out windows, and the empty streets, and she told us that St. Louis has always wanted to be a big city, but is still and ever was a small town.

My first conference activity this morning was going to hear Sara Ahmed, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels, and Stephanie Harvey speak on Igniting Kids’ Curiosity and Passion with Student-Directed Inquiry Circles. My favorite part was Sara’s section on Soft Starts, where the elementary and middle schools they work with have a 5-15 minute “soft start” to the day where they come into the classroom, find a book or newspaper or magazine, find a comfortable beanbag chair or place on the floor, and read for a few minutes before they begin class. Another version of this soft start that Smokey Daniels presented was a middle school in Kentucky that has kids waiting at the door to come in and choose to do a dance party or reading or work on hands-on projects for a few minutes before the day of learning begins. The end product in all of these experiments was a group of students who were more settled, more relaxed, and more ready to learn. I thought about how I practice a “soft start” with my high school classes by asking them to pause each morning for 3-5 minutes to do a mindfulness exercise. Sometimes we just focus on breathing, sometimes we do morning sun salutations outside facing the sun or the Flatirons, and sometimes we lie down on the floor, put our feet on the chairs in astronaut position and just take a few minutes to calm our minds and bodies. The result for my students is that they can then come to the work of the day in a more relaxed and more focused mood, and they are able to get more work done in less time, because they have a clear mind and a more relaxed body to get into whatever we are working on that day.

For lunch, I was fortunate to go to the Secondary Section Luncheon where Daniel Jose Older, who has a new YA book called Shadowshaper out, spoke to us about the value of teachers in supporting and encouraging young writers to become committed writers of the future. He said “Teachers are magic, and magic is dangerous!” and he spoke about how his mother, who was a teacher, encouraged him in his writing and creativity, as did his teacher in middle school, who gave him a book entitled Bloodchild by Octavia Butler. He didn’t read it or really understand it until 10 years later, but when he did, it became one of his inspirations for writing his own work. He said he did not see himself in books because he was a young boy of Cuban descent in New York, and he said most books he read in school did not contain black or brown characters unless they were being saved by white men. He asked us “How do you survive the long night of invisibility when you love a genre that doesn’t love you back?” Great question, and one that he is trying to answer by writing YA books that feature young characters of color who are powerful in their own right. Daniel ended his talk with the statement that “Literature’s job is not to protect young people from the ugly world around them, it is to arm them with language to describe what they already know.” Powerful words from a powerful writer.

So what did I learn today? I learned that the best way to get to know a place is by getting outside and walking in the streets and parks and secret sections of town. I learned that soft starts can work for children of any age, and I would say soft starts would even work in an adult work environment too, if adults could put down their cup of coffee and calm themselves for a few minutes before diving into work. I learned that I need to be more aware of the diversity in my classroom, and how I must choose works which speak to all the cultures and colors present there. I learned that “Teachers are magic, and magic is dangerous!” And I learned that spending my time, money, and effort to come to the national conference to present with my colleagues brings me closer to them in the shared expenditure of energy, and allows us to share some of the work we are doing at our high school with the rest of the teaching world.

Z did a pretty good job getting the global feel last night in her post– me I was pooped and went to bed.

I woke up this morning thinking about our presentation yesterday, and Jimmy Santiago Bacca, and the awesome people we get to see and get to know here at NCTE.

We did this session yesterday about our songwriting workshops, and I went to a great session on folk songs/protest songs, and we had a lot of conversations about authenticity.

Being ourselves in the classroom (and the rest of our lives). One of the things that I find so magnetic about Bacca is that he is completely himself. There is no distance between the poet and the man. I drove him to the airport last year when he came to visit us, and we spent the ride talking about trucks (he was asking if I like my Tacoma- yes, of course I do), which sounds pretty mundane. At the same time he makes more casual literary references than just about anyone I’ve ever known. And I do know a few lit geeks.

When he’s teaching he’s no different- he’s just being him. When I started teaching, like a lot of folks, I thought a lot of things about how I had to ‘be’ as a teacher. The short version is that most of it is bull. The part that isn’t bull is that I do have to know what I’m doing when it comes to literacy- other than that, the more me I am, the better I feel, the better kids respond, the better the whole thing works.

That’s what we were getting at with the two prongs of authenticity idea. It isn’t enough to ask kids to do authentic things. You have to BE your authentic self. The songwriting stuff came to be because I got busy being my authentic self- and to be authentic I had to bring that self to work. I couldn’t really be someone else.

And it’s the same for your students. We have to make classroom spaces where they can be themselves. They won’t do authentic work (no matter what the assignment), if they can’t be authentic people. If they can’t be who they are. Note- that doesn’t mean you have to tolerate disruptive or abusive behavior, but but you do have to be ready for honest conversations about school, your class, teaching, what your class is doing, whether they like it, whether it’s working (this is actually a really cool conversation to have), and sometime just some time to talk.

There has to be room for choice and self creation in your class. For you AND the students. How are you going to be your authentic self in the classroom?

And to put in another frame- if we are expected to differentiate for our students, then we have to differentiate for teachers.

Jimmy Santiago Bacca said in his morning address:

“Make your classroom as individual as you can to affirm your own spirit.”

Also- holy hell St. Louis! What is up with Gooey Butter Cake!?!? That stuff will kill ya.

Well we’re here. St. Louis. In the shadow of the arch. Surrounded by our people (that’s the best part).

Like I’ve done for NCTE the last several years, I’m writing this evening to pull together what I thought about today (and last evening since I didn’t write last night). I’ll start with our friend and Colorado colleague, Julia Torres, from the opening session on Thursday:

. @juliaerin80 talking about how ‘controversial’ often means ‘foreign’ and ‘unfamiliar.’ Super smart. And true. #ncte2017

In a conversation about controversial books, Julia pointed out that we have to question what is considered controversial because what’s unfamiliar is what is often labeled as controversial. This sent me into my notes from my grad school work, searching for the tidbits that helped me to formulate my instructional purposes for teaching literary works:

“Social imagination is the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, in the streets where we live and our schools. Social imagination not only suggests but also requires that one take action to repair or renew.” – Maxine Greene: Releasing the Imagination

“Literature focuses on the possible, inviting its readers to wonder about themselves. […] Literary works typically invite their readers to put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and to take on their experiences.” – Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice

“Good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. It inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one’s own thoughts and intentions.” – Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice

“Narrative fiction creates possible worlds–but they are worlds extrapolated from the world we know, however much they may soar beyond it. The art of the possible is a perilous art. It must take heed of life as we know it, yet alienate us from it sufficiently to tempt us into thinking of alternatives beyond it. It challenges as it comforts. In the end, it has the power to change our habits of conceiving what is real, what canonical.” – Jerome Bruner, Making Stories

Books challenge us and our students to imagine the experiences of others, to see possibilities beyond our own realms of existence, to connect, to question.

Books are our weapons in the battle we fight in our classrooms for our students’ hearts, minds, and humanity, as Jimmy Santiago Baca told us this morning.

I have seen Jimmy speak on a few occasions–and I am amazed that I’ve never heard him repeat any story from his life. He has a universe of stories in him. But today was different–he was speaking especially to us: teachers, of reading and writing, about the critically important work we do. As he spoke, I wrote madly in my writer’s notebook to capture as much as I could. Here are a few tidbits:

When will we turn our classrooms into places where we can speak again? Instead of an incessant unbelievable march for acceptance?

Turn classrooms into battlegrounds for hearts and minds.

We are the leaders. Leagues of students will follow us.

Imagine a world without teachers for one second. Everything goes dark.

Whenever there’s controversy, there are teachers. That’s who we are.

Don’t mess with the teachers, dude.

Students are the makers of history because of us. Teach them to use language as a weapon of love to fight the lies.

We are the dream makers.

Weaponize your words to fight injustice.

Just write. Even if it’s only “Hi pencil.”

Make your classroom as individual as you can to affirm your own spirit.

Education taught him that he could make his own life.

Make mistakes. Since when did we start living trying not to make mistakes?

The thing we have is amazing endurance to deal with so much crap.

There is something magic about Jimmy Santiago Baca. We were lucky to have him in our school in the spring of 2016. Picture 100 high school seniors, knee-to-knee in the library, writer’s notebooks on their laps, completely rapt by Jimmy. He told stories. He talked about writing. He asked them to write. He asked them to stand and read their words aloud. And they did. It was beautiful.

A real highlight of my day was this:

At the podium is Nancie Atwell. I started my career with In the Middle back in 1994 in my composition for teachers class during my teacher certification program at the University of Colorado. Miles Olsen told my class that we better be able to clearly articulate what we thought about In the Middle when we walked into job interviews as if Atwell’s book was so seminal that every self-respecting language arts department across the country would know about it and have an opinion about it.

I waited for that question in my first job interview back in 1996, and it never came. I got the job and at some point asked my colleagues what they knew about Atwell. They did not know who she was and were not familiar with the book or even workshop pedagogy for that matter. I didn’t quite know what to do with all of that. I was in first year teacher survival mode anyhow, so I just set aside the whole question, having no idea how right Miles Olsen was about the impact of Atwell’s work on my career.

She told the story of one of her students who came to her as a non-reader and ended up reading around 50 books during his 8th grade year in her classroom. And then he went off to high school where he fake read only two books in 9th grade. She spoke of how the readers she cultivates in her classroom have to put their reading lives on hold for the four years of high school language arts.

Enter intense feelings of inadequacy. I worry that even though I intend to build readers in my classroom, I end up squelching them somehow. We do one book together each semester but the rest of what they read is independent or book group reading on books that they choose. But my students are not reading 50 books in a school year.

Atwell repeated a few times the list of components students need to become readers: choice, access to intriguing books and intriguing invitations to read them, time to read in class, conversations with peers and the teacher, expectations from the teacher to read outside school voluminously. I know the things I need to work on–and it all comes down to more talk about books in my classroom. A community of readers can truly persuade a student to pick up a book, and than another, and another. We do some talk about books–but I know we can do more.

Atwell turned it over to Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher to talk about how they cultivate high school readers. They were inspiring as always, and I’m anxious to get my hands on their upcoming book. I had to leave early to get my brain ready for our presentation, but as I left the auditorium, I heard Kelly say, “I’m a literacy teacher, not a literature teacher.” Yes.

Our presentation today was really different from any other presentations we’ve done, and it was a total blast. The core of it was what Jay is calling “two-prong authenticity”–authentic for both teacher and students. Music is in the realm of authentic for our students–they steep themselves in it. And for a singer-songwriter like Jay, music is in the realm of authentic for him. We’ve done songwriting workshops for the last two years for our senior LA class. His insight from inside the process as a songwriter makes the workshop meaningful for students and makes songwriting approachable even for those who do not even begin to consider themselves songwriters. In our session, we modeled the process we’ve used with our students to get them writing songs and shared some resources. And then people wrote some songs.

Jay brought his guitar and he sang–a few of his own songs and and a few songs that people wrote during the time we provided for them to play around with songwriting. Here’s a clip of him working with one of our attendees to put her lyrics to music. Huge thank you to everyone who came to the session. We really enjoyed working with you! We will post our presentation materials here sometime tomorrow.

In the interest of sleep, I’ll wrap this up, even though there is definitely more I could say about my day today. We present again tomorrow: a follow up of last year’s Stop Grading presentation that gets into more nuts and bolts about what the process has been in our classrooms to move away from traditional routes to the semester grade. (3pm, I.22, room 143–hope to see you there!)

Finally, last evening I got to hang out with my student teacher from seven years ago, who was here representing the Denver Writing Project at the NWP meeting. I love NCTE for the connections. I love these meetings for how they cultivate leaders, like this rock star teacher (whose rock star-ness was crystal clear to me in her very first days in my classroom as a pre-service teacher all those years ago). She’s doing great work in her school and for her students. I know I was supposedly the mentor, but I learned a lot from her.

Friday: Singing Your Own Song In the Classroom: Teaching poetry as writers and musicians in a writers workshop setting. #3495029 (yes, I might sing you a song in this one) 12:30 pm – 01:45 pm America’s Center Convention Complex 232

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We had a group of teachers from another school visit us yesterday (Z gets all the credit for making that happen, I just show up and talk). They spent the day hanging out in our classes, asking questions, sharing ideas. They were really super people, the sort of people you’d be thrilled to work with.

Reflecting last night, there were a few things that came to mind.

First, if you want change, seek community and connection. Change, especially big change, is really tough to do on your own. A lot of what was great about our engagement yesterday was, at least for me, that feeling of connection and community. The feeling that you are not alone in trying something new or difficult. I hope it was the same for our visitors.

Second, if you want to really understand what you are doing, try to explain it to someone else. We will be going to NCTE next week in St. Louis to present on a few things we’ve been playing with. We’ve done that a lot, and yesterday was not the first time we’ve hosted a bunch of teachers to look at what we are messing with. The value of presenting, either formally at a conference, or informally by hosting others in your classroom, is that it forces us to reflect on what we are actually doing, and then try to articulate, as best we can, what that is. That helps us iterate, update, create, recreate, etc.

The third thing, which I’ve written more about recently (see Rome and Building), is that nothing happens fast. It has taken us a lot of time to get where we are, and we aren’t ‘there.’ In fact, there is no ‘there.’ There’s just the process. Which is why ‘iterate’ has become my new favorite word. One of the things I felt like I didn’t get a chance to say yesterday to these awesome teachers who came to see us was “you’re already there.” They are already doing it. They may not be on the same iteration we are, and if they have a good process, they may never be. They won’t replicate what worked for us, they will create what works for THEM. For their students, in their community, in their context.

This process is really the creative process. We cycle through this over and over. It’s what we are trying to teach our students about reading writing, and it’s the way we get better at reading and writing ourselves, it’s the way Z is working on a book, it’s how I write songs and stories.

The more of it you can get in your life, the more lively and alive you will feel. The better the things you create will be, the more meaningful it all is.

Friday: Singing Your Own Song In the Classroom: Teaching poetry as writers and musicians in a writers workshop setting. #3495029 (yes, I might sing you a song in this one) 12:30 pm – 01:45 pm America’s Center Convention Complex 232

Doc Z and I presented yesterday at the Colorado Language Arts Society conference on getting away from grading, and using feedback to teach/encourage reflective practice in our students. We packed a lot into 75 minutes, and the teachers in our session asked some really terrific questions that, at least anecdotally, indicate that the shifts we are making resonate with lots of teachers.

Underneath all the really terrific questions people asked is one big underlying question, or maybe it’s just an emotional reaction. When presented with the possibility of radical change, which is what we are discussing, the normal, appropriate, and understandable reaction, is to feel immediately overwhelmed and lost. And since a lot of teaching is feeling that way anyway, having more of that feeling thrown at you doesn’t always feel good.

After the presentation an attendee asked me how I manage to do conferencing with my students- given that like her, I have 25+ students in every class, and they are ninth graders, and if I’m in a focused conversation with one student, that’s maybe 24 other students (or more) who are maybe not on task, or getting into trouble, or need help, and if it takes 10 minutes to conference with one student, and that makes about 250 minutes to have a conference with each kid in the class (or more, lets be real), and there are only 240 minutes in my class week, and there are other things I’m expected to do, and, and, and, and, and…

You get the idea.

My answer comes in two big parts.

First- I was at a presentation some years ago by Mark Overmeyer, who is a terrific resource on conferencing with students. A teacher asked a version of the question posed above, and ended with “if I get to one writing conference a semester with my students, I feel like that’s all I can do.” Mark responded, with zero time to think, “and that’s one more than you ever got, isn’t it?”

Second- Rome wasn’t built in a day. I say that a lot. The stuff Doc Z and I are talking about is the far end of ten solid years of thinking, writing, experimenting, failing, trying again, iterating, tinkering, guessing, following dead ends, and making u-turns. We didn’t start this yesterday, and we in no way have it figured out.

This is not about being ‘perfect.’ Ever. There is no finish line, no medal, no having it down and doing it that way for the next 20 years (in fact- teachers who teach like that, if I may be frank, suck).

We’re just trying to do it better than we did yesterday. Most of the time we run on intuition and guesswork. We live with ambiguity and uncertainty. We work with some of the most talented teachers I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to, and they help us figure things out every day. We do conference presentations not because we think we know what we are doing, but because doing a presentation a) forces us to be reflective and articulate what we are thinking as clearly as we are able, and b) allows us to talk to more people, which generates more thinking and a larger sense of professional community in which we can continue to innovate, experiment and iterate.

Change takes time, comes slow, and involves a lot of messing around. We figure out how to overcome one obstacle at a time. Usually, when I think I’ve got one thing figured out, something else that needs to be figured out rears its head. The question is never ‘how can I change everything I’m doing,’ because you can’t. But you can take one interesting idea and try it next week. And see what happens. And they try it again in a slightly different way. And if you keep doing that, and you work on finding a supportive community for thinking about these ‘experiments,’ I promise you that ten years from now you will be radically transformed.

And one of the transformations will be to see that there is no ‘there’ to get to. If I’m still teaching in ten years, I hope I will be a totally different teacher than I am now. If I’m not, I will be both bored, and boring, and really bad at my job. Living things grow, or they are dead, and no longer living. Us, our students, our institutions, are living. They need to be growing, or they die.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. It grew. Over centuries. And then something else replaced it. And grew. And was replaced.

We are always learning and changing, and growing. It’s what living things do. But we don’t always do it quickly. That’s okay. As long as we are doing it.